More About Time

By analogy with the sun, whose light is apparently reaching us in 8 minutes, it means that we are only viewing the sun 8 minutes ago when we look up at it. However, what if we were eventually able to build powerful machines that could view light from say hundreds/thousands of years ago, wouldn't that mean we would be able to observe what anyone did at any given time (given that we know their rough whereabouts at that time, e.g. where they lived). I think this is more a question of: Do things we can observe die out immediately, or travel as light, or get stored somewhere